What If the Thing You Decided to Value Was You?

We Found $400 at HomeGoods

Hi Green Door Life Fam

It started with a stack of hundred-dollar bills in the middle of HomeGoods.

Rafa and I were walking through the aisles in Brentwood, Tennessee, on one of those Saturday mornings where you're wandering around looking at lamps and pillows without really knowing what you're looking for.

And then I saw something that definitely didn't belong with the pillows.

A stack of $100 bills.

Four hundred dollars, just sitting there.

I walked over and looked around.

Did someone drop this?

Was someone looking for it?

Was this some kind of prank?

Was there a camera somewhere watching to see what we would do?

Rafa and I started inspecting the bills, trying to figure out what was happening. Then he flipped one over.

On the back were the words:

FOR MOTION PICTURE PURPOSES.

Fake.

And just like that, $400 became worth essentially nothing.

Except something interesting happened.

The moment its monetary value disappeared, another kind of value appeared.

To Rafa, it arguably had negative value. Try to actually use it and you're probably going to have a problem.

To me?

It suddenly had novelty. Story. Playfulness. A connection to movies and imagination.

Same piece of paper.

Completely different value.

And that got me thinking.

Who Decides What Something Is Worth?

Value can change incredibly quickly.

Change a number.

Change the environment.

Change who's looking at it.

Put a crack in something and its value might plummet.

Yet in the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, imperfection can become part of what makes something beautiful. What one person sees as damage, another may see as history, character, and meaning.

So much of value comes from an agreement.

We collectively decide that something matters.

Money might be one of the clearest examples of this, but we do it everywhere.

And standing in HomeGoods holding fake money, I realized something else.

Our behavior was being influenced by the possibility that someone might be watching us.

Is this a prank?

Is there a camera?

Are we supposed to leave it here?

Can we take one?

Does this belong to the store?

The simple possibility of being witnessed changed the conversation.

And that is where this silly little Saturday morning moment became something much bigger for me.

We Behave Differently When Someone Is Witnessing Us

There are times when we need to be completely alone to discover who we are without anyone else's expectations.

And there are other times when being witnessed is exactly what helps us become who we are trying to become.

This is one of the reasons I believe coaching to be so powerful.

When you tell another person:

This matters to me.

This is where I want to go.

This is what I'm going to practice.

Something changes.

There is even research supporting this.

In research conducted by psychologist Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California, participants who simply thought about their goals accomplished about 43% of them. Participants who wrote down their goals and action commitments, shared them with someone, and sent weekly progress updates accomplished about 76%.¹

That's a 33-percentage-point difference.

Now imagine if you increased your goal success by 33% in any area of your life...

Not because someone suddenly developed more willpower.

They created commitment, structure, and accountability around something they had decided was valuable.

And that's an important distinction.

Accountability isn't someone deciding what should matter to you.

It is someone helping you stay connected to what you've already decided matters.

What If the Thing You Decided to Value Was You?

This is where I keep coming back to our work inside The Green Door Life.

What happens when we assign real value to learning our own bodies?

Not another diet.

Not another 30-day challenge.

Not someone handing you another list of rules to follow.

But learning to recognize the information your body has been giving you all along.

Hunger. Energy. Sleep. Recovery. Strength. Digestion. Menstrual cycles. Body composition. Movement. Stress.

Your body is constantly communicating.

And the more fluent you become in that language, the questions begin to change.

Instead of asking:

What diet should I follow?

You begin asking:

What is my body telling me?

Instead of:

What workout is best?

You begin asking:

What kind of movement supports my body right now?

Imagine knowing how to build a meal that works for you without needing someone to hand you a meal plan. Understanding what your hunger is communicating instead of fearing it. Knowing how sleep, stress, movement, food, hormones, and recovery interact.

Imagine being able to recognize when your body needs more fuel, more recovery, more movement, or a different approach entirely.

And when something changes, because life and bodies always do, imagine knowing how to recalibrate.

That is the user manual for your body.

It's the shift from constantly searching outside yourself for the next answer to developing the knowledge and awareness to make increasingly informed decisions for yourself.

And that's where I believe the real value lives.

Not in what happens over 30 days.

Not even in what happens over 12 weeks.

The real value is what you're able to carry with you for the rest of your life.

And Then We Add Coaching

Now imagine learning all of this while someone is witnessing the process.

Someone is there when the old patterns show up.

Someone can help you see what you can't quite see yet.

Someone can ask a different question.

Someone can remind you of the goal you said mattered to you.

Someone can help you parse through the noise of the "do this, not that" dogma of the fitness industry. 

And then we add another layer:

Community.

Other people learning their bodies alongside you.

Other people asking questions you hadn't thought to ask.

Other people navigating restaurants, vacations, hormones, hunger, body changes, fear, frustration, breakthroughs, and everything in between.

Coaching creates accountability.

Community creates reflection.

Education creates autonomy.

And when those three things come together, something powerful happens.

You stop outsourcing your relationship with your body.

And you start learning how to lead it.

Awaken Your Nutrition Begins September 21 

For more than eight years, we've watched thousands of people make more progress in twelve weeks of Awaken Your Nutrition than they did in the previous five years of trying on their own.

Not just because they got the right, bio-individual information but because they finally had someone walking alongside them while they applied what they already knew, plus the missing pieces they didn't.

If you've been collecting nutrition information for years and the results haven't matched the effort, the gap probably isn't your intelligence.

It's implementation.

And implementation changes faster in proximity.

Plus, your brain already has enough to micro-manage in this day and age.

We support you through the hardest parts of change because we've lived through them ourselves.

And spoiler alert: the work of supporting your body never really ends.

Your hormones change.
Your stress changes.
Your schedule changes.
Your seasons of life change.
Your body changes.

Which is exactly why we teach principles and skills you can apply for life, not stagnant information that keeps you dependent on our coaching forever.

Our goal was never to create perfect "clients".

Our goal is to help you become someone who knows how to support yourself for the long haul.

The September cohort of Awaken Your Nutrition is now open for early bird enrollment ($500 off) until September 21st.

[Click here to apply for Awaken Your Nutrition]

You'll speak directly with one us on a complimentary Zoom session so we can audit your current habits and map out a game plan for your next steps. 

And if you're ready to sign up now, click reply and we'll send you the $500 early bird special pricing link (not available on our website).

 Shannon 

Shannon Morse 

Founder of The Green Door Life | NAMS Certified Nutrition Consultant | Somatic Practitioner | Master Personal Trainer

P.S. Maybe the greatest value of being witnessed isn't that someone keeps you accountable forever. 

It's that, eventually, you learn how to witness yourself.

You learn to see the patterns, hear the signals, make the adjustment, and trust yourself enough to know what comes next.